Software Tools

Monday, 21 January 2013

With this blog being mothballed I wanted to mention that you can now find out Building Performance Analysis related information, news, and learning material at the Autodesk Building Performance Analysis blog run by Emile Kfouri and John Kennedy.

Monday, 30 January 2012

I have put together a series of videos outlining the process of Rapid Energy Modelling, from developing an outline in 123D Catch to modelling and analysis in Autodesk Revit or Vasari. These give a taster to what is possible for analysing existing building portfolios, additional analysis can be carried out in Autodesk Green Building Studio or third party applications.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

A new release of Autodesk Green Building Studio has gone live with some great new features, some in particular aimed at existing portfolio analysis:

Utility Building History Upload. Now you can upload the utility history of existing buildings to compare to your simulation results. In the Run List you can now view and edit utility data that is currently assigned to a project.

Historical Weather Data. Over 10 years of historical data is automatically selected for your project location. Now when you upload the billing history of your existing building, the weather data is automatically synchronised to that billing period.

Run Results Charts. New Monthly and Annual results charts allow you to quickly sort and review a large number of runs in your project.

gbXML file Upload. Now you can upload gbXML files without a desktop client.

There has also been some tidying up of the interface and one nice enhancement I noticed is your currency is automatically selected for your project location, no more need for me to trawl through a long list looking for GB Pounds :-)

Friday, 07 October 2011

The Northern Europe Technical Team are running a series of webcasts on various AEC products and workflows, some have already been run and recorded, others are scheduled for live presentation over the next few months.

Tuesday, 04 October 2011

Last week Autodesk announced Autodesk Cloud, an offering for customers featuring a range of web based capabilities. Some of the functionality is new, some has been around for some time. From the sustainable design perspective, two of the previously available energy analysis tools are included, namely Autodesk Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis and Autodesk Green Building Studio, videos of which can be found below:

Further details on the benefits of Autodesk Cloud and how to access them can be found at:

Also improved with this release is the automatic zoning of the energy model. Previously zones were divided based on points of the compass, now they are divided based on the building geometry - which overcomes the sometimes rather odd divisions you got before:

Finally check out the parameters slider add-in that works with 2.1, more details here:

Monday, 18 July 2011

The Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program supports pioneers in the sustainable design field and my colleague Jerker Hagglund alerted me to one such company in Norway who are benefiting from this program.